Lacma

If there's anyone who knows how to tell a spooky story, it's "Nightmare Before Christmas" spielmeister Tim Burton. He and the exhibit of his artwork are the inspiration for this series of nighttime storytelling that lasts throughout the month of July. The first one will feature "Creation Myths and Other Mysteries of Nature" with storyteller Karen Golden. LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. (323) 857-6000. 7 p.m. Fri. and every Fri. in July. http://www.lacma.org

Nine o'clock on a Saturday morning might seem a tad early for an art opening, but this one, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is particularly spirited. About 200 people -- trustees, patrons, museum curators and others, some of whom have flown in from Dallas and New York for the event -- stream into the lobby of LACMA's Resnick Pavilion, where a range of works have been staged across three galleries. At one end, a dapper man in a plaid sports jacket inspects an 18 th century painting by Antonio de Torres, “Virgin of Guadalupe,” with a magnifying glass (plucked from a bowl of them at the exhibit entrance)

One of the highlights of the Angel City Jazz Festival, the multidisciplinary collaboration Dirty Baby takes its inspiration from Ed Ruscha's "censor strip" paintings and combines them with the music of Nels Cline (of the band Wilco) and the poetry of David Breskin. Cline will lead two music ensembles, Breskin will read his ghazals and Ruscha's images will be projected. A book and album signing will follow. Bing Theater, LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. 7:30 p.m. Thursday. Free (reservations recommended)

The collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is officially 10 pieces larger. At Saturday night's gala at the museum -- the culmination of its 29 th annual Collectors Committee weekend -- trustees, patrons and others voted on which works, from among curators' selections, the museum should acquire for its permanent collection. Nine works were on the ballot, representing a broad range for the encyclopedic museum, which has a collection that spans ancient Egyptian art to contemporary works; all nine were purchased, including a Japanese “Pair of Guardian Lions” from the 9 th century and contemporary works such as a 3,300-pound, lavender-hued glass work by Roni Horn and an interactive video game installation by Feng Mengbo.

With the film series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art heading into the sunset, this weekend and the next provide a chance to do three good things at once: (1) experience the soon-to-be-empty Leo S. Bing Theater, one of this city's great movie venues, (2) see some wonderful films -- "Being Jewish in France," a compelling documentary, from Friday to Sunday, and "Leon Morin, Priest," a rare Jean-Pierre Melville classic on Aug.

Late in 2008, when the critically revered but financially teetering Museum of Contemporary Art was mulling rival rescue plans to pull it back from the brink of collapse, two issues were paramount. More than four years later, even as news breaks of yet more proposed solutions to MOCA's lingering distress, they still are. One issue was the need to vastly increase the museum's paltry endowment, which had never come close to being adequate for a 30-year-old institution whose ambitious mission -- and achievement -- was international leadership as "the defining museum of contemporary art. " The other was autonomy.

With nearly 300 photographs edited and sequenced by the artist himself, this retrospective on the career of Robert Adams, "Robert Adams: The Place We Live" seeks to document his fascination with the changing landscape of his native Colorado, as well as the rest of the West. Starting in the mid-'60s and carrying through to this most recent decade, this show will focus on Adams' photography of the Los Angeles terrain. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Open Sunday through June 3. lacma.org.

With the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 's expansive "Stanley Kubrick" exhibition set to close on June 30, the museum's film department is revisiting several key movies in the maverick filmmaker's oeuvre. Each of the director's films in the series "Kubrick and Co. " will be paired with an important work by another filmmaker, including Michaelangelo Antonioni ("Red Desert"), Ingmar Bergman ("Hour of the Wolf"), Sam Fuller ("China Gate") and Max Ophuls ("Lola Montes"). The series opens May 31 with Kubrick's 1957 anti-war film, "Paths of Glory," starring Kirk Douglas, followed by Joseph Losey's 1957 drama "Time Without Pity," revolving around a man's (Michael Redgrave)

The Foodprint project brings its series of international conversations about food and the city to Los Angeles on Sunday. LACMA will be hosting the event in its Brown Auditorium where a large and multi-disciplinary panel of experts and advocates will gather to discuss L.A.'s food systems. Researchers, journalists, politicians, biologists and artists, among others, will chime in on food from production to consumption while addressing environmental, ethical and economic concerns.

It was lost and now it's found, and the world of Orson Welles enthusiasts, which very much includes me, counts itself grateful and amazed. I am talking about 66 minutes of footage from an endeavor called "Too Much Johnson," which Welles shot in 1938, three years before "Citizen Kane" changed everything. Not only had this material never been seen publicly, it had been presumed gone forever when the villa in Spain where Welles thought it was stored burned down nearly half a century ago. Discovered in a warehouse in Pordenone, Italy, by local film society Cinemazero and beautifully restored via a collaboration between the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., and the National Film Preservation Foundation, "Too Much Johnson" is ready for its Los Angeles close-up.

Shortly after assuming the helm as the fourth director of the Museum of Contemporary Art last month, Philippe Vergne visited the Los Angeles Times to meet with editors and writers. Still in the beginning stage of absorbing MOCA's history and formulating his mission, he didn't have a great deal to share about his plans. But when asked whether he thought performance, a currently disregarded part of the museum's founding mission, was important, Vergne answered that he wouldn't call it important.

Quentin Tarantino is going unplugged. Having shelved plans to produce his script for the western "The Hateful Eight" after it was leaked online, the filmmaker will give fans a chance to experience it in the form of a live reading at LACMA on April 24. The "Pulp Fiction" and "Django Unchained" mastermind will cast and direct the reading of the script, which is set in a saloon in the middle of nowhere after a blizzard diverts a stagecoach from...

On this dark, drizzly afternoon, one could easily miss Helen Pashgian's Pasadena art studio, a converted piano warehouse nestled down an alleyway between a parking garage and a coffee house. Except that Pashgian's brick studio is painted sunny yellow and ocean blue, and it pops against the surrounding blur of concrete and gray sky - a spot of light and levity amid the heavy and the dreary. The 79-year-old artist, a pioneer of Southern California's Light and Space movement of the '60s and '70s, also pops when she appears in the entrance.

MARCH 28-AUG. 25 'In the Land of Snow: Buddhist Art of the Himalayas' Pasadena's Norton Simon Museum is well-known for having the most impressive collection of European Old Master and early Modern paintings in Los Angeles. Less familiar is the museum's exceptional Indian, Nepalese and Tibetan art. This show will chronicle the movement of Buddhism from India to the Himalayas more than a thousand years ago, bringing numerous important loans together with superlative examples of painting, sculpture, ritual and decorative arts from the Simon's own collection.

"The Face of Love," which opened Friday in Los Angeles and New York, is a movie about a well-to-do L.A. woman (Annette Bening) who becomes obsessed with a man who closely resembles her dead husband (both played by Ed Harris). The movie is a reserved character study, a late-autumn romance and an exploration of the uncanny. It's also an ideal advertisement for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where key sequences of the story were shot. Writer-director Arie Posin shot at LACMA over a four-day period in 2012.

Beautiful and terrifying, the painting hangs in the foyer of Cheech Marin's oceanside home. It depicts a car crash on the upper deck of an L.A. freeway, an appallingly seductive vision of maimed metal erupting into fauvist-tinted fireballs. "That's the fascination, that fear-attraction simultaneously," says Marin, best known as the more antichalf of the comic duo Cheech and Chong. Three years from now, "Sunset Crash" will be among the big draws of the most comprehensive exhibition devoted to Carlos Almaraz, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Titled "Playing With Fire," it will be part of "Pacific Standard Time: L.A./L.A.," a Getty-funded, multi-venue initiative that will explore artistic connections between Los Angeles and Latin America.

With a historical survey focusing on “institutional critique” up at the Hammer Museum right now, it's only fitting some real-time critiques should happen elsewhere around town. Like Andrea Fraser and Fred Wilson, Austrian German artist Maria Anwander trains her eye on the structures that underlie the museum system. Although her exhibition at Steve Turner Contemporary comes across as a bit bloodless, it benefits from being right across the street from her prime target: LACMA. A banner hanging outside the gallery mimics official LACMA banners perfectly.